An ongoing business enterprise uses and maintains data related to the company's business, such as sales numbers, customers, business opportunities, and other information pertinent to sales, revenue, inventory, networking, etc. The data is stored on a database that is accessible to company employees, and frequently, a third party maintains the database containing the data. For example, the database can be a multi-tenant database, which maintains data and provides access to the data for a number of different companies.
To facilitate effective use of data, many business organizations have a system to help manage the company's interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects, commonly known as a customer relationship management (CRM) system. A CRM system may provide various mechanisms for reporting and viewing data, such as a “dashboard,” which is a specialized graphical user interface (GUI) that provides visualization of data, particularly performance metrics. A dashboard typically contains one or more components, each of which represents information of significant analytical value to the user. A dashboard can combine information from multiple and often disparate data sets, which makes it difficult to filter information that is presented on the dashboard. Thus, known solutions may filter a few components, and usually only if the components come from the same data set. The problem is that users rarely know which components are filtered thus creating some ambiguity about the information displayed on the dashboard.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide systems and methods that overcome the above and other problems relating to facilitating the analysis of shared information to improve networking across a database system maintained on an external server, such as a multi-tenant database.